must listen to what I have now to say, the first and the last word
from me to you.

"'I must be just and acknowledge that he truly loved me, the man
who plucked me like an apple from the bough; later on he made what
amends he could by proclaiming me his wife under the Doomsman law.
Yet it was a tiger-cat rather than a woman whom he had taken to his
bosom, and I wonder now that I did not a thousand times overpass
the limits of his forbearance. Assuredly, in that first agony, I
tried my hardest to stretch his patience to the breaking-point, in
the hope that a knife-thrust might open for me the doors of the
prison-house. You see, I was very young, and I could not forget my
cousin Philip's eyes.

"'A woman's heart is like a cup; it holds but one fixed quantity of
life's essential liquor, be the latter sweet or bitter. An infinity
of little sips or one deep draught, what does it matter? The vessel
is empty in either case. Yet, as time went on, I grew to endure
existence; afterwards, when my Esmay was born, I valued it again
for her sake. Moreover, she was his daughter as well as mine, and
so I came finally to endure and even to welcome the touch of my
master's hand. In all these years it had never been aught but
gentle, for all that they called him Mad Scarlett, and the children
were taught to believe that he always wore gloves, because he had a
bloody palm whose stain no water would wash away. Yes, and I wept,
as any wife and mother might do, on that gray November day when I
knelt beside his bier.

"'But this concerns only myself, and it is of Esmay, my daughter,
that I would speak. In a year she will be seventeen, and before
that time, if at all, the way must be opened for her to go to her
mother's people. I am helpless, except for this one opportunity of
committing a message to the hands of Chance, one slender line
dropped into the ocean of uncertainty. Yet nothing remains to me
but to make the cast, for in six months' time I shall be dead; I
can count the downward steps of my disease as clearly as though
they formed part of the actual stairway under my feet.

"'And this also I know--that the message will reach you, my
brother; so far, at least, my eyes are permitted to explore the
advancing darkness. You will assuredly receive this le